Thursday, July 5, 2007

Prada disappointment

I got to play around with the LG Prada phone a bit today, and it was a very disappointing experience. I had expected it to be slick and designish, but while the design of the actual phone was quite nice, albeit very conservative, the user interface was horrible. It's implemented using FlashLite, a piece of technology that I haven't really bothered to have a closer look at before, and after seeing the Prada phone in action I just want to forget about it.

Some time ago I read a blog posting about FlashLite, by someone working at Adobe. He wrote something like "on a regular phone you'll achieve a framerate of 6-7fps", which I wrote off as a joke. But he wasn't joking. It really is that slow! Actually, the "animations" I saw on the Prada phone looked more like slideshows.

I work at TAT (yes, I agree, the homepage is quite ugly), where we develop stuff like Kastor, a graphics engine, and Cascades, a UI toolkit. Currently, we're working with four out of the five biggest OEM:s (although only Samsung and Sony/Ericsson are offical so far, you'll hear about the others as soon as I'm allowed to speak of them, ie. when they have products with our code in them on the market). Our solutions are so vastly superior to FlashLite that it's a shame to even call Adobe a competitor. I've been hearing that we're really good at what we're doing ever since I stated working at TAT, and I've sure noticed that my co-workers are competent, but I had no idea that we were so much greater than the so called competition.

If you can't get a framerate of at least 15fps, you're not even in the game. All that Adobe can hope for is that Moore's law will keep up its promise, that all phones will soon have hardware accelerated graphics or whatever. Until then, FlashLite is a joke. And it's still a joke if you need workstation type hardware to run their software. Sorry. If stuff like this is acceptable in the mobile phone business, I can finally understand why people are ranting and raving about the iPhone. I just hope I'll get to play with one of those one of these days. I'm sure I won't be as disappointed as I was by the Prada UI.